Posts Tagged ‘mutt’

I realize that I haven’t written my customary “software stack” post for this year yet. But hey, from where I’m sitting, I still have … 36 minutes to spare

I’ll be using the same categories as last year; system, communications, web, development, office suite, server, organization, and entertainment.

System

The OS of choice is still Archlinux, my window manager is still wmii, my terminal emulator is rxvt-unicode, upgraded by also installing urxvt-tabbedex.

My shell is still bash, my cron daemon is still fcron, and my network manager is wicd.

To this configuration I’ve added the terminal multiplexer tmux, and have lately found out just how useful mc can be. Oh, and qmv from the renameutils package is now a given part of the stack.

Communications

Not much change here, Thunderbird for email, Pidgin for instant messaging, irssi for IRC.

Heybuddy has been replaced by identicurse as my micro-blogging (identi.ca) client. Heybuddy is very nice, but I can use identicurse from the commandline, and it has vim-like bindings.

For Pidgin I use OTR to encrypt conversations. For Thunderbird I use the enigmail addon along with GnuPG.

This means that Thunderbird still hasn’t been replaced by the “mutt-stack” (mutt, msmtp, offlineimap and mairix) and this is mostly due to me not having the energy to learn how to configure mutt.

I also considered trying to replace Pidgin with irssi and bitlbee but Pidgin + OTR works so well, and I have no idea about how well OTR works with bitlbee/irssi (well, actually, I’ve found irssi + OTR to be flaky at best.

Web

Not much changed here either, Firefox dominates, and I haven’t looked further into uzbl although that is still on the TODO list, for some day.

I do some times also use w3m, elinks, wget, curl and perl-libwww.

My Firefox is customized with NoScript, RequestPolicy, some other stuff, and Pentadactyl.

Privoxy is nowadays also part of the loadout, to filter out ads and other undesirable web “resources”.

Development

In this category there has actually been some changes:

gvim has been completely dropped

eclipse has been dropped, using vim instead

mercurial has been replaced by git

Thanks in no small part to my job, I have gotten more intimate knowledge of awk and expect, as well as beginning to learn Perl.

I still do some Python hacking, a whole lot of shell scripting, and for many of these hacks, SQLite is a faithful companion.

Doh! I completely forgot that I’ve been dabbling around with Erlang as well, and that mscgen has been immensely helpful in helping me visualize communication paths between various modules.

“Office suite”

I still use LaTeX for PDF creation (sorry hook, still haven’t gotten around to checking out ConTeXt), I haven’t really used sc at all, it was just too hard to learn the controls, and I had too few spreadsheets in need of creating. I use qalculate almost on a weekly basis, but for shell scripts I’ve started using bc instead.

A potential replacement for sc could be teapot, but again, I usually don’t create spreadsheets…

Server

Since I’ve dropped mercurial, and since the mercurial-server package suddenly stopped working after a system update, I couldn’t be bothered to fix it, and it is now dropped.

screen and irssi is of course always a winning combination.

nginx and uwsgi has not been used to any extent, I haven’t tried setting up a VPN service, but I have a couple of ideas for the coming year (mumble, some VPN service, some nginx + Python/Perl thingies, bitlbee) and maybe replace the Ubuntu installation with Debian.

Organization

I still use both vimwiki and vim outliner, and my Important Dates Notifier script.

Still no TaskJuggler, and I haven’t gotten much use out of abook.

remind has completely replaced when, while I haven’t gotten any use what so ever out of wyrd.

Entertainment

For consuming stuff I use evince (PDF), mplayer (video), while for music, moc has had to step down from the throne, to leave place for mpd and ncmpcpp.

eog along with gthumb (replacing geeqie) handles viewing images.

For manipulation/creation needs I use LaTeX, or possibly Scribus, ffmpeg, audacity, imagemagick, inkscape, and gimp.

Bonus: Security

I thought I’d add another category, security, since I finally have something worthwhile to report here.

And sometimes (this was mostly relevant for when debugging passtore after having begun actively using it) when I have a sensitive file which I for a session need to store on the hard drive, in clear text, I use quixand to create an encrypted directory with a session key only stored in RAM. So once the session has ended, there is little chance of retrieving the key and decrypting the encrypted directory.

Ending notes

That’s about it. Some new stuff, mostly old stuff, only a few things getting kicked off the list. My stack is pretty stable for now. I wonder what cool stuff I will find in 2012

This is the last post in the series. It has taken me a while to write, edit, and then rewrite because I didn’t like the first outline (which I didn’t realize until I got to the end).

The software I have listed in these posts are there for a reason. While they work well in their own right, when put together, the whole forms something greater than the individual pieces.

Lightweight

Most of the software on the list is lightweight, almost a requirement as one of my systems is a netbook, and although the resources on my desktop seem almost infinite in comparison, I want to be able to work with my things on the netbook as well.

CLI

I go for CLI-apps rather than GUIs because that, more often than not, keep my fingers planted on the home row, instead of the right hand scurrying off to the mouse ever so often. Because, more often than not, the CLI-apps are more lightweight than the lightest of GUIs. And because more often than not, a CLI takes up less screen space to convey the same amount of information, as a GUI does.

CLI-based programs will also work when the X-server has broken down, and your stuck in a TTY, or you have your software on a server and are accessing it over SSH from a computer where either you or the system is unable to install the software.

Plaintext

I prefer plaintext over binary storage formats because it leaves me in control. If the worst comes to the worst, I can retrieve the data I need from a simple text-editor.

Not to mention that plaintext is easier to diff, which is good when you check it into version control and run into a conflict.

In the case of LaTeX, one of the best practices I picked up was to let each chapter be its own file, and then have a master-file which includes the chapters.

What this means is that when you want feedback on a specific chapter, you only need to send that, and not the entire project, which is bandwidth friendly.

And please, no comments about fancy gigabit infrastructure all over. You try sending an email or surfing on a long train ride when there are 10+ douche bags hogging all the bandwidth listening to Spotify…

Plaintext is also rather easy to parse. Combine this with a shell script, and your imagination is your only limit to the stuff you could do.

The future

There are definitely more uses for the server, such as VPN and perhaps a mumble server. Time will tell. I do know that I will spend the next couple of days trying to configure nginx and uwsgi so I could start doing some Python web-stuff.

I have been considering dropping Pidgin and instead give bitlbee a try. This would mean that all communication (with the exception of email and microblogging) would instead go through irssi. That would mean one less GUI-app, and also that all the logs would be gathered in one place (on the server) instead of the current situation where Pidgin logs are interspersed between the desktop and the netbook.

I have in a similar fashion thought about replacing Thunderbird with mutt. It would mean that I would replace one software (Thunderbird) with five (mutt, msmtp, offlineimap, abook and mairix).